clhs sciblog

Professor Stephen Hawking poses the following questions in his recent talk. “How did the universe come into being? Where did life come from? Are we alone in the universe? Is there alien life out there? What is the future of the human race?” Up until the 1920′s every one thought that the universe was static and unchanging in time.  Then it was discovered later in time that the universe was expanding and that distant galaxies were moving away from Earth. Thus, meaning that the must have been closer together previously. He concludes that if we were to infer back that we would find that all galaxies and Earth were on top of each other about 15 billion years ago. This was the Big Bang, the beginning of the universe. But was there anything before that? And if there wasn’t, what created the universe? Why did things happen the way they did? Scientists used to think that the theory of the universe could be divided into two parts. First there were the laws like Maxwell’s equations and general relativity that determined the evolution of the universe given its state over all space at one time. Second there was the question of the initial state of the universe. Hawkings claims that they have made good progress but are still unsure about the initial conditions of the universe.

He then goes on to answer the question pertaining to alien life? Are we really alone? He says that life arose spontaneously on Earth, so it must be possible to do on other suitable planets. But he still isn’t sure on how life first appeared. Scientists theorize about the fossils of algae they have from 3.5 billion years ago. The Earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago and was probably too hot for the first half billion years. So life appeared on Earth within half a billion years of it being possible which is short compared to the 10 billion year lifetime of the planet of Earth type. This suggests that the probability of life appearing was very high and that if it were low it would have to take most of the 10 billion years. Thus, they drop the idea of alien life due to the fact that UFO’s would not just appear to crazy people and that they have not heard or seen any aliens. Therefore, there is the insurance that there will be no alien abductions.

Lastly, he notes that if we are the only intelligent human beings in the galaxy, we should make sure we survive and continue. But we are walking in danger. Our population and use of the finite resources of Earth are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill. But, we are genetically coded with selfish and aggressive instincts that were for survival advantage in the past. It is hard enough to avoid disaster even in the next hundred, thousand or million years, so he believes that our only chance for long term survival is to not remain on planet Earth, but to spread out into space. Therefore, he is in favor for “personed” space flight.

The account of the 6 days of creation in Genesis and Darwin’s theory of evolution tends to be a controversial subject among Christians. There are various theories to reconcile the biblical account of creation with the secular account of creation. In order to reconcile these contradictions with secular science, Christians have proposed several theories. One being the gap theory, which claim there are billions of years between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2. Another theory is the day-age theory. This is the belief that each of the 6 days of creation could represent more than an actual day, as we know according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, time is relative. Again this does nothing to explain the contradictions. Billions of years cannot be added to any particular day. Even if we could find a place for the billions of years within the 6 days of creation without sacrificing the inerrancy of the Bible, we would then have to accept that death and bloodshed came before sin. However, death is a result of sin, hence the necessity of the crucifixion of Jesus. Another is that the Bible is only the word of man, and not the truth. The truth is that science is also the word of man and it is changing every day. The Bible, on the other hand, has remained unchanged. Finally, every single word of the Bible is true. From day to day, creation scientists are finding more and more evidence to support the 6 days of creation. There is nothing wrong with science, but in my opinion, in the end it is the fallible word of men.

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